Life in LoFi: iPhoneography | iPhone Photo News, Showcases, App Reviews

Some random thoughts and a short review. Not enough for full blog posts, but each warrants some level of discussion. A Thursday edition of Musings….

• I love my new iPhone 4. Its greatness transcends the cellphone suck that is AT&T in my neighborhood (making calls downstairs is an exercise in dropped calls — more bars in more places, except my house). I’ve had it almost one week and I’ve made phone calls, run apps, edited images, tested a lot of apps, checked in on Foursquare, downloaded data. All throughout, the new phone has shined. The only thing I really haven’t done yet is to go on a shoot with my new camera. I’ve taken snapshots… and they’re gorgeous. I want to see what this phone has behind the lens. I really want to take Four out for a shoot.
  .
• 

  ColorShadow screenshot

  ColorShadow [App Store link] by Hokuson is a pretty cool app. Colorshadow is an app that does variations of one effect, but does it very well. Basically, it converts your image to a stark monochrome and then layers a color gradient over the parts of the image that aren’t white. Because of the stark contrast, it works best when your source image has a simple background that contrasts from the subject. The effects are retro in an early ’70′s Ironside or a ’90′s original iPod commercial kind of way. It’s not a camera — doesn’t even give you the option. It loads images from your camera roll and saves them out at up to your iPhone’s full resolution (including 5MP on the iPhone 4) or a smaller webready size — nice! It’s really easy to use. The effect is very retro and kinda funky. ColorShadow is a good app. I like it. It’s $1.99 in the App Store.
  .

• If you upgraded your iPhone this time, what do you plan to do with your old iPhone? I’m keeping mine as a spare camera…. I’m keeping my old 2G for those times when I want to shoot digital lofi, not app lofi into my images. The new iPhone 4 camera is really nice. It has excellent clarity, fantastic color and saturation, and a lot less noise than the older cameras. It improves on all the image qualities that made the older iPhones unique — the noise, the color, the overall tint and saturation. The new iPhone 4 is almost a real camera. Its pictures are bright and crisp without needing to run them through a DRC app first. The old iPhone 2G and 3G are true digital “toy” cameras. As mobile phone cameras improve, I suspect that the old iPhones’ value as digital toy cameras — both monetarily and from a iPhoneography standpoint — will only increase and become sought after.
  .

=M=

~~~~